C.D. Wright's "Crescent"

Thoughts on drawing nearer.

Crescent

In recent months I have become intent on seizing happiness: to this end I applied various shades of blue: only the evening is outside us now propagating honeysuckle: I am trying to invent a new way of moving under my dress: the room squares off against this: watch the water glitter with excitement: when we cut below the silver skin of the surface the center retains its fluidity: do I still remind you of a locust clinging to a branch: I give you an idea of the damages: you would let edges be edges: believe me: when their eyes poured over your long body of poetry I also was there: when they laid their hands on your glass shade I also was there: when they put their whole trust in your grace I had to step outside to get away from the cravenness: we have done these things to each other without benefit of a mirror: unlike the honeysuckle goodness does not overtake us: yet the thigh keeps quiet under nylon: later beneath the blueness of the trees the future falls out of place: something always happens: draw nearer my dear: never fear: the world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on it


from Steal Away: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2013)

---

I love this poem so much. Read the last couple lines again:

draw nearer my dear: never fear: the world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on it

Everything about these clauses, these sort-of-sentences, calms and comforts me. I think about these words often, in the way that some poems just seem to arrive inside your brain without warning. Draw nearer, Devin, I’ll say to myself, walking outside at night, looking up toward the tops of lit-up buildings in the absence of stars, thinking of this — the absence of stars, the forever-electric lights of buildings — and feeling in me a kind of ceaseless anxiety that has no origin and seems to have no end. And Wright’s words will finish themselves for me. Never fear, I’ll say. The world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on it.

What better reminder is there — of anything, perhaps — than that?

Just before I sat down to write this, I was jotting down in my notebook some lines I had underlined or asterisked or quadruple-circled from recent books I’ve read, and I copied out this one, from Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk:

We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong.

Yeah. Dillard is right. We got it wrong and we get it wrong. We get it wrong all the time. But I love the reminder from Wright’s poem above. The world doesn’t get the light wrong. No. The world spins nightly toward its brightness. It gets the light right everyday. We are just along for the ride.

In revisiting this poem for the umpteenth time, what surprises me as a result of my present attention is my focus on Wright’s use of the colon as the guiding punctuation of this poem. It’s something I’ve noticed but never fixated on, I think because of the fact that it just, well, works. Wright’s colons feel like they allow the poem to move the way that a wind up car moves — forever forward, but in fits and starts, peppered with these brief pauses.

I just finished Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence (which, I realized while reading, is a book constructed in a similar way to this newsletter, except that each little essay is about a single sentence, and infinitely smarter and more stylish than I could ever be), and, in an essay about a sentence by Roland Barthes, Dillon writes about colons. The punctuation marks. Though it is also, perhaps intentionally, an essay about gastronomic delights. He writes:

For a long time, in essays at school and university, and in the first things I wrote for publication, I hoped to emulate [Barthes’s] use of colons: they seem to function so frequently like semicolons or dashes: they make something happen: rather than issuing onto, introducing an example or list, they mark a transformation: inside the sentence, outside in the world.

Dillon’s book is a joy to read because of passages like these, where he is at once playful and keen — willing to model exactly what he is paying attention to, and honoring the beauty of it at the same time. In his introduction, he writes:

[T]he truth is I wanted to write a book that was all positives, all pleasure, only about good things.

I love that. I love that sentiment and its result. I love the joy of it — the joy in the midst (and as a result of) such critical generosity.

But anyways, I had just read that passage about Barthes, and maybe that is why I turned back to today’s poem — a poem I’ve admired for so, so long. It is a poem, as I mentioned above, comprised entirely of colons, devoid of literally any other punctuation mark (including a period!). What to make of that? Let’s talk about it.

In a brief history of the colon, the professor Christopher Mulvey writes:

In earlier times, as a breathing sign, the colon’s position was a midway breathing, somewhere between the one-pause comma and the three-pause stop…

The colon was never only a breathing mark; it was from the beginning also an equals sign. It indicated an equivalence between meanings that it both separated and joined.

I love the poetry of both of these definitions, that the colon is a somewhere-in-between kind of marker of breath, is an equals sign, something to indicate equivalence.

Both of these definitions take on special meaning within the context of today’s poem. The idea of the colon as a “midway breathing” mark gives Wright’s use of it — instead of a comma or period — a sense of the ongoingness of life, its anxiety and everydayness. The colon, in this sense, seems to say exactly what the final line of the poem says:

draw nearer my dear: never fear: the world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on it

Such a moment is full of life — the midway-ness of it. Each clause allows for the next. Everything is enjoined toward the light that comes at the poem’s end.

This feels enhanced, to me, by the fact that the word colon owes its origins (sorry, I’m going to do the thing that us writers so often do that is almost certainly a cliche at this point, but I refuse to apologize for it, even though I just apologized for it) to the Greek word kōlon, which is defined as a limb or member of a body. And so, in thinking of today’s poem, Wright’s consistent use of a colon instead of a comma, a semi-colon, or a period not only gives the poem this sense of ongoingness, but it also unites the poem into something coherent. If each colon is its own limb — a finger, a foot, something small and fragile and beautiful — then the poem, as Wright writes it, becomes a body. It is as if, in the words between the colons, Wright is constructing a soul, is issuing breath to these limbs, is gathering the poem together, forming something whole and living, is giving the body its heartbeat. If part of language’s pedagogy — part of how it teaches us — is its intentionality, then I see in Wright’s intentional use of colons a reminder for us: we are fragmented in our wholeness: we are forever engaged in the building of our lives: we are the breath between our bones.

In a brief interview about C.D. Wright, the wonderful poet Bradley Trumpfheller writes, of Wright’s work:

My favorite thing about her, I think, is her intransigent commitment to self-criticism, even when it makes for a more confusing or hesitant poem.

I feel, in today’s poem, that same hesitance that comes out of a real desire to say something about the self. It’s right there in the poem’s opening:

In recent months I have become intent on seizing happiness: to this end I applied various shades of blue: 

Notice how the poem begins with such honest activeness. Seizing happiness. Grabbing it. Taking it. Wright could’ve use a softer verb — knowing or feeling. But I think the word seizing conveys part of Wright’s honesty as a poet. She wants what she wants. To portray that so openly is a kind of critical gaze directed toward the self. And it’s funny, because notice again how the poem ends:

draw nearer my dear: never fear: the world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on it

Yes. The poem begins with an acknowledgment of activity and passion and agency, and it ends with this soothing admission of passivity. Don’t fear. We are here. On this world. Along for the ride.

There’s a line from Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining that reads:

Everyone in their car needs love. Car love. Meat love. Money love. Pass with care.

Hang some string lights between the two trees these poems make, and turn them on and let them shine as they connect the care at the heart of each. And then string some more lights to connect these two poems to the final lines of Wright’s poem, “Everything Good Between Men and Women”:

Bless it. We have so little time
to learn, so much... The river
courses dirty and deep. Cover the lettuce.
Call it a night. O soul. Flow on. Instead.

Draw nearer. Pass with care. Bless it. These reminders in Wright’s work are often the result of turning over and over again in the mind the things that one notices — about the world and about the self, of beauty and anxiety, of so much and so much else. When Wright writes something like pass with care after a sentence such as everyone in their car needs love, I feel her thinking about her own self-criticism, her own hesitation and anxiety, and I feel her extending that to everyone she sees. Pass with care, she says as a result. Draw nearer, she says as a result. Bless it, she says as a result.

These are gentle reminders within a decidedly ungentle world. I think we need them everyday.

Just the other day, a few teachers and I took a group of our students ice-skating. We made the same trip last year, and it was such a joy that we made the trip again — taking the subway downtown from the Bronx, walking from Grand Central to Bryant Park. I am a decent ice-skater, though nothing like Levin from Anna Karenina, which I’m reading now. As a side note, Tolstoy makes Levin seem like an absolute fucking god on the ice; he describes how Levin “raced out on to the smooth ice and glided effortlessly, speeding up, slowing down, and directing his course as if by will alone.” I just picture him zooming along and twirling through an awkward crowd. You have to love it. But anyways, I can hold my own on the ice and do some little nifty things with my feet that make me feel like a Pretty Cool Guy. My students, however, were my favorite aspect of this recent trip. Many of them have little to no experience ice skating, and yet they were so excited to get on the ice. They laced up their skates — some far too loosely — and then somehow simultaneously eagerly and delicately they stepped onto the ice, clutching the outside wall with both hands.

I watched them as I skated around the rink. I watched them hug their friends and let go — almost screaming — of the wall as they ventured together toward the middle of the rink. I watched them take a tentative step or two and smile as they didn’t fall. I watched them fall, sometimes, and laugh. I watched them help each other up, sometimes falling and laughing in the process. I watched them try to impress one another. I watched them laugh a lot. So much. I’d stop sometimes, or a student would call me over, and they’d reach out for me, and I’d try my best — though I didn’t really know how — to teach them how to skate without falling. At one point there was a group of us, five wide, a couple teachers and several students, all of us linking arms and trying not to fall. It was so gently warming to see a student — so spunky and assertive inside the classroom — approach the ice with a fragile tenderness that turned their body into something teetering and still joyful. It was warming, too, to see an often-quiet student learn quickly and determinedly how to skate in circles around their peers. And their smile, too. A smile always warms.

I often need the reminder that we are as full and complex and beautiful as we are. That our fragility is part of who we are. That we can be spunky sometimes and tender at others. That this is us: sometimes tentative on the ice, sometimes confident, sometimes reaching out for one another. Sometimes falling still. I need this reminder certainly for myself, when I feel stuck and defined by my anxiety or my shame. But I need it for everyone, too. It is the same reminder that I read at the end of today’s poem, after Wright moves through the self and the world and comes to that gorgeous and generous conclusion — that we are here together on this bright, spinning world, a world that gets the light right always, that has never once failed to offer a morning after night, and that we should hold one another close as a result. There is something worth learning from light after all, isn’t there?

I am thinking now about how Wright doesn’t end her poem with a period: I am thinking about how maybe the poem is still writing itself somewhere: the world is certainly still turning: just this morning I awoke to light: there is something I need to remember about that: there is something I need to hold on to: it is not me that brings the light each morning: it is the world: but I am here: I am trying to learn from light: you are here too: I am with you: we are together along for the ride: draw near: never fear: pass with care: bless it: bless it all

---